Customer Reviews

Comprehensive Organic Transformations: A Guide to Functional Group Preparations

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I want to help others sort through the conflicting reviews of this book. As a PhD chemist, I can say unequivocally that this book is not for the non-professional, as I suspect the negative reviewers are. The indexing system is not intuitive, but makes sense once you've begun to use it. One of the reviewers complains that database searching is better than this book. This book is intended to help you find straightforward procedures for relatively straightforward reactions and allows you to look at the many things that have been tried to effect a given transformation. These are things that the databases can't help much with since these reactions have been done in the literature thousands of times, and any search will generate a huge mess of matches.

This is a very good book for looking up references on a great variety of transformations. This book is probably not as good a March's book, but complements it very well. Between these two books, you can probably find any reference you want.

This is one of the best reference books to use if something in literature doesn't go according to plan...which it almost always does.

It's also extremely helpful in drug design and helping plan those unknown reactions, etc.

I don't think this would be helpful to anyone except organic or synthetic chemists.

This is really a good reference book for organic chemists, and it's very comprehensive. The drawback is the index. I hope they can improve it for the next editions.

I agree that the bad reviews are probably predominantly from non-chemists. Larock's first edition has become an absolute standard reference on the desk of the practicing organic chemist, who is after lead references and an idea of how a given transformation has been done. I have seen his 2nd edition and it is much the same, only updated and expanded. The price is high, but typical for the field and quite justified. I am waiting til I can buy it with faculty startup funds, but in 6 months it will be on my desk!

The following comments are offered as counterpoint to other reviews, and are collected here so that I can offer the excellent rating I do, above. I apologize for the redundancies that appear. M-ED


In response to 'Matthew M. Yau':

COT is the practical encyclopedic work of choice among books of its type, and is well worth the time it takes to master it's indexing and formats.

Other encyclopedic books lack the practical pointedness and insight that comes from an actively publishing chemist/group still in the thick of the research game. This criticism cannot be leveled against the Larock book. That group is in the thick of it, and moving ahead the forefront of modern research chemistry. (Most of us wish that we might contribute as much as he/they already have.) In re: comparison with March, see also Comment to 'gregory.schaaf' below.


In response to 'A reader' / 'don't waste you time' [sic] :

The care and thought that appears to have gone into this review makes it almost unworthy of reply, but since Amazon has no weighting system for their review scoring, and this review brings the average score down for this important synthetic organic research reference, it demands comment.

COT is the practical encyclopedic work of choice among books of its type, and is well worth the time it takes to master it's indexing and formats.

Moreover, in a period where the shear numbers of articles on syntheses and methodologoes are exploding, the careful hand of a knowledgable pro becomes all the more useful. Choosing problems to work on is a challenge, not of seeing what's out there, but of understanding what's not -- ie, perceiving the areas of darkness amidst an emphasis on the well-lit geographies of the chemistry landscape. Map's like Larock make much faster the job of perceiving such, allowing one to use computer search tools and other encyclopedic works all the more effectively to do the followup scholarly work necessary (filling in gaps, looking to more recent literature threads).

Speaking personally, my group and I are publishing, and have received funding for, novel synthetic paths/ideas that arise because we are stimulated by the cataloging the Larock group and others have done.

Finally, other encyclopedic books -- and the above reviewer's naive comment to the contrary, the one volume nature of Larock, thick as it is, is a benefit -- lack the practical pointedness and insight that comes from an actively publishing chemist/group still in the thick of the research game. This criticism cannot be leveled against the LaRock book. They are in the thick of it, and moving ahead the forefront of modern research chemistry. (Most of us wish that we might contribute as much as he/they already have.)


In response to 'gregory.schaaf':

It is generally understood (I think) that [other']s book, while encyclopedic, lacked some of the practical pointedness and insight that might come from an actively publishing chemist/group still in the thick of the research game. This question might be addressed by the addition of [new authors to] current production.

The foregoing criticism cannot be leveled against the LaRock book. Larock's group is in the thick of it, and moving ahead the forefront of modern research chemistry. (Most of us wish that we might contribute as much as he/they already have.) In this sense, COT is the practical encyclopedic work of choice, and is well worth the time it takes to master it's indexing and formats.

my son the chemist wanted this for a x-mas present, he is very pleased, he said that it has everything in it, very expensive, but it was okay!

This book provides an excellent starting point for a literature search on a particular reaction. Unlike an electronic database, the references provided are generally just the most useful ones.

The title "Comprehensive Orgainc Transformations" strikes me with much hope that all representative functional groups tranfer and reactions will be fully explained and included in one volume for easy reference. Well, not so quick.

Cited references from this volume might be the only (+) that I will credit to the piece. The organization of the book is extremely perplexing and weird. It is not very easy to find a reaction that I desire. In fact, the details for transformation are disappointingly little. If you plan to get this book with the same expectation, you should turn to Jerry March's Advanced Organic Chemistry or the Beilstein Cross-Fire Organic Reaction and Compounds software. Any advanced texts on organic synthesis will give you more details.

Oh, by the way, the price () is just stunningly high and ridiculous.

Comprehensive? Possibly, the book is large enough to brain small animals. Can you find anything in it? Probably not. The book is organized in some bizarre fashion that is hard to comprehend. Besides, in the age of computers, who needs it when you can search databases directly. Even for people without access to chemical databases, there are better references out there.